Stop Pretending You Really Know What AI Is

“Artificial intelligence” is broadly used in everything from science fiction to the marketing of mundane consumer goods, and it no longer has much practical meaning, bemoans John Pavlus at Quartz. He surveys practitioners about what the phrase does and doesn’t mean:

It’s just a suitcase word enclosing a foggy constellation
of “things”—plural—that do have real definitions and
edges to them. All the other stuff you hear about—machine
learning, deep learning, neural networks, what have
you—are much more precise names for the various scientific,
mathematical, and engineering methods that people employ
within the field of AI.

But what’s so terrible about using the phrase “artificial
intelligence” to enclose all that confusing detail—especially
for all us non-PhDs? The words “artificial” and “intelligent”
sound soothingly commonsensical when put together.
But in practice, the phrase has an uncanny almost-meaning
that sucks adjacent ideas and images into its orbit
and spaghettifies them.

Me, I prefer to use “machine learning” for most of the algorithmic software I see and work with, but “AI” is definitely a convenient (if overused) shorthand.